Monday Confessions: Keeping It Simple

I've got a photography related confession this week: I'm a sucker for (mostly) unedited photos... I shoot in RAW, which gives me the flexibility of changing loads of things like white balance, contrast, and exposure really easily, and that's usually where I stop as far as editing goes... In fact often I don't even crop the images once I get them open, I think that comes from doing my daily photo late in the evening so often, and when comparing images if I had one I needed to crop and one I didn't, I'd just take the one that was ready to go...

Same with post-processing, every now and then I'll use the healing tool (or clone, usually a mix of the two) to erase small skin blemishes or little bits of the photo I think need correcting (creases in fabric, random shadows, etc)... And sometimes I'll even add a warming filter or a curves layer to pop the colors... Aside from that, I'm just way too lazy to do all these spiffy post-processing effects that are so super popular online it seems...

This image, for example: 

I'm seeing some crazy post-processing possibilities here, a sepia overlay at half opacity with crazy contrast and blown out highlights to the background and a texture layer over the whole thing, with faded edges to really seal the deal on the whole 'this is an antique photo taken a hundred years ago' vibe... Me? My vibe is more of a 'I took this yesterday, but I had my iso super high so I got some cool grain, that counts as vintage looking, right?' I dunno I just think making your photo look old or over-contrasty or whatever the effect is just makes photos kinda gimmicky sometimes, when the image right out of the camera looks pretty decent...

 Now that's not to say I don't like photos that have been post-processed... I just find that when I start doing that kind of stuff to photos I've taken, it's usually to fix something I don't like the look of... So I try my best to fix it by adding loads of corrective and artistic layers, and usually not to the best of results either. Plus, I'm very well aware that most people who are putting up these fabulous images are using free-ware action sets downloaded from blogs, deviantArt, and other sharing sites... Not that I'm knocking that, I've used several downloaded actions myself on occasion, but I always feel like I need to take back control of my photo by altering those actions, so it's not just my image with someone else's creative stamp on top of it...

I think it also has to do with working at a portrait studio for a little while where we couldn't do any post work to any images, in fact it was company policy not to, even to correct a mistake of our own fault like dust on a lens! It made me start looking at my own photos and seeing how much I relied on saying 'eh I'll fix it in post' and realizing it took way too long to fix things =P so I just stopped...

So I hope you've enjoyed these sorta out of camera images... I do have a couple of others from this set that in theory I'm going to do some post treatments to, just to have some fun with them...

Wondering where these were taken? click on over to my deviantArt page for today's shot: 1138grl.deviantart.com